Group items tagged

And while some of it must remain under strict control, particularly in public companies, much of it is unnessarily — and usually to a fault — hidden, unreused, and unexploited.

Explain the reasoning behind retaining more knowledge, in making it public, searchable, and organizing it via tagging.  Describe the benefits of being able to access much fresher and more up-to-date information elsewhere in the organization because their colleagues are managing more of their projects, tasks, and other work via social tools. 

Provide useful templates for common activities and reference material such as projects, tasks, resource management, policies, procedures, standards, and so on.  You still have to keep template layouts and template usage simple; excessive structure tends to kill the golden goose of contributions quickly.  But a little basic structure goes a long way and prevents contributors from having to figure out how to structure all the white space and provide a simple layer of consistency.

The enterprise has not caught up, largely because most enterprise information doesn't allow a hyperlink structure, and links aren't encouraged very much when it does

setting up blog and wiki directories as well as good enterprise search based on link ranking (which is what Google does to make the right information come up in the first few pages of search results.) 

Provide your own search engine in the tools only if you must.

, the real issue, day in and day out, with getting Enterprise 2.0 to take off is to educate, evangelize, demonstrate, and most importantly, evolve the interface and structure of your tools until you pick the right formula that resonates with your audience.

This boils down to having some form of moderation, either human or automated, to ensure that the level of discourse remains at some bare minimimum acceptable standard. 

A high-profile executive sponsor that obviously uses the tools can also help in a big way.

Triggering an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem quickly is likely an early activity driver.  This can mean a lot of things but the link structure of Web tools allows information to quickly flow, circulate, and mesh together.  You can leverage this in a almost infinite number of ways to drive user activity, interesting content, create awareness of what the company is "thinking", and more.  For example, create a blog for every employee in the company and mail the link to them with instructions on how to use it. >  Create a social bookmarking site for the enterprise where everyone can see what is being bookmarked by everyone else that day. >  Create an internal Wikipedia that contains a seperate copy of all Intranet content and let users edit away. >  The possibilities are endless and provide a much greater number of "entry points" where people can get started with these tools.

The problems will be with the business culture, not the technology. 

For example, create a blog for every employee in the company and mail the link to them with instructions on how to use it. 

Create a social bookmarking site for the enterprise where everyone can see what is being bookmarked by everyone else that day.

Create an internal Wikipedia that contains a seperate copy of all Intranet content and let users edit away.

Allowing the output of SQL queries to be inserted into wikis when they load, calling Web services or using Flash badges that access data resources can turn Enterprise 2.0 tools from pure knowledge management into actual hybrids of software and data

And the reverse should be true as well, getting data back out into traditional tools including Office documents, PDFs, and XML must be easy to inspire trust and lower barriers to use.

Another problem is that managers may not worry that their employees would not be comfortable contributing information to a social-networking tool. Rasmussen said he talked with one executive who said employees may not want to contribute personal items to their home page.

" 'Are you kidding?' " Rasmussen responded. "This is work. We force people to do stuff [they don't want to do] all the time — we make people come in sober and wear clothes. In certain cases top-down may not work, but in certain cases it does."

Contributors need to learn to accept "an agency-neutral non-ownership" stance to their articles, he said.

"If you bring too many locks into an overly cautious culture, that's all you get: locks," Rasmussen said. He also mentioned that mashups remain to be too difficult for non-programmers to create, and social networks continue to be held, presumably unfairly, by higher standards than other technologies.

the transition to social business is about involving and engaging people far more than it is about picking a technology or building the infrastructure.

There is no simpler or more effective way to build the connections and your social business fabric than creating conversation.

But sitting back and waiting for the world to involve your business in what they do is just no longer an option. Too often, they will just go off to the communities that have already engaged them and that will be that. "Experience share" is your new measure of success, meaning the amount of time that the world interacts with you socially.

As I said then, "communities exist to serve the needs of their members" and themselves second if they intend to have a successful long-term relationship, as in most human relationships.

Social business doesn't mean we throw open the doors to everything automatically as a public process either. But we are usually so far in the other direction that a step towards this is just the right medicine right now.

Social analytics, however, are already here and this story is about individuals anyway. If workers aren't measured by how effective they are at creating value on the network, they will just focus on what they are measured on to get their recognition, raises, and promotions. This is a complex subject that will often have very different ground rules for different organizations.

Do not use social channels for traditional push communication. Classic examples: Don't use online communities for distributing press releases, product literature, PR, or spokesperson canned messages.

Censorship kills participation. Nothing will stop a social business in its tracks faster than inappropriate censorship.

But nothing will remove you from the world of social businesses faster or more effectively. Honest, open conversation is always the better choice and is truly valuable in its own right. Respond to criticism constructively and quickly.

If you are working closely with customers, partners, employees using social tools (as well as people are potentially want to be in one of those three groups) the more you do it, the more it will seem as if there is one cohesive community.

Where one gets a paycheck and what organization's name is on a business card is less important than the fact that everyone is getting more value than if they were doing things in a non-social way.

Everyone involved in a social relationship must get something out of it or there's no reason for it.

Being social for it's own sake may generate downstream value accidentally but social businesses will often have a long list of intentional reasons they are being social.

There are almost certainly a lot more rules for social businesses, but we're still learning them.